Each year the Gesellschaft für Neuropädiatrie (GNP) has the privilege of granting the Peter-Emil-Becker-Price to one high-ranking scientist with special merits in the field of child neurology. The nomination is based on a decision of the executive board of our society. The Price is generously sponsored by Thieme, the publisher of our official journal, Neuropediatrics. The list of all honorable awardees since 1998 is available on the GNP home page. The awardee is invited to give the Peter-Emil-Becker-Price Lecture during the annual conference of the GNP. To open the content of the Emil Becker Lecture to a broad circle of readers, awardees are kindly asked to provide a nonreviewed manuscript for publication in Neuropediatrics.
In 2012, the Peter-Emil-Becker-Price has been awarded to Prof. Masaya Segawa, Director of the Segawa Neurological Clinic for Children in Tokyo, Japan. The following briefly summarizes the laudatio and curriculum of Prof. Masaya Segawa.
Prof. Masaya Segawa was born in Tokyo in 1936 and from 1956 to 1962 attended the School of Medicine at Tokyo University. From 1963 to 1966 he was a resident at the Department of Pediatrics at Tokyo University, headed by Prof. Tadao Takatsu, the founder of the Japanese Society of Child Neurology. From 1966 to 1972 Prof. Segawa worked as a senior consultant in pediatrics, and in 1970 he achieved his PhD. From 1973 to the present, Prof. Segawa has been the Director of the Segawa Neurological Clinic for Children and, in addition, holds appointments at the Dokkyo University and the Toho School of Medicine, and he is an active lecturer at Juntendo and Iwate University School of Medicine. In 1970, Prof. Segawa was the first to describe an inherited form of childhood-onset dystonia in nine patients out of six unrelated families. From his clinical observation of marked diurnal fluctuation and response to low-dose l-dopa therapy, the entity was coined Segawa syndrome. In 1994 Prof. Segawa and his research group identified the underlying defect by describing autosomal dominant mutations of the GTPCH gene. For his outstanding lifetime work, Prof. Segawa holds several awards, including the prize of the Japanese Pediatric Society in 2011, the Congress Award of the 15th International Congress on Parkinson's Disease and Movement Disorders, and the Best Child Neurologist Award donated at the International Child Neurology Congress 2010.
At the GNP conference of 2012 in Münster organized by Prof. Gerhard Kurlemann, the audience experienced Prof. Masaya Segawa as a vital person and active researcher, and it was impressed by the continuous enrollment of Prof. Segawa in the delineation of a treatable movement disorder from its first clinical description until clarification of its molecular background.
The GNP is honored to affiliate Prof. Masaya Segawa to the honorary list of Peter-Emil-Becker-Price awardees.
Prof. Masaya Segawa (Tokyo University; middle), Prof. Dr. Barbara Plecko (Department of Pediatrics, University Children's Hospital, Zurich; left), Graham Brumfield (Thieme Publishers; right).
Certificate of the Peter-Emil-Becker-Price.
